The MassEditRegex extension allows administrators perform a single edit across multiple pages in one step, by running a regular expression over the content of each page. This is well suited to performing simple edits such as renaming a template, adding pages to a category, or correcting typos (all of which can be done in the same edit operation by supplying multiple regular expressions.)

Contents

Once the extension has been installed and permission masseditregex to use MassEditRegex has been given, go to "Special:MassEditRegex" and fill out the edit form (see screenshot). Familiarity with regular expressions is required to use this extension.

This extension comes with an extra user right called "masseditregex" to allow fine grained control of which user groups may use this extension. By default it is assigned to no user group. In case you would like to assign it to a user group e.g. "masseditregexeditor", add the following code to you "LocalSettings.php" file right after the lines added in step (3) of the installation process:

$wgGroupPermissions['masseditregexeditor']['masseditregex']=true;

Alternatively you may grant the permission to an existing user group, e.g. "sysop" by adding the following line:

Server-side execution is the default as it (should) be faster. However editing large numbers of pages will cause server timeouts due to PHP limits on script execution time. To work around this (and perhaps to get better feedback on progress) you can tick 'execute in browser' to have the job tracking done on the client-side. This should mean timeouts are no longer a problem.